


Hello Again

by BrokeTheLights



Category: Little Nightmares (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Discussion, Gen, I was complaining that the children should have had a better ending even before the game came out, Little Nightmares II Spoilers, Mostly talking, Post-Canon, Spoilers, Talking, Theoretically Canon-Compliant, a little bit of action, anyways here's this!, love some good old fashioned angst, more canon-compliant than the other one lmao, which turned out to be canon-complaint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29396322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrokeTheLights/pseuds/BrokeTheLights
Summary: For Mono it's been so, so long, but for Six it's been merely a day or two. Time is changing, ticking backwards and away from Six as she confronts what they've become. She must escape before the city collapses, and try to live with the demons inside her mind.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 94





	Hello Again

There was a knock on the door, singular, loud, and hard, as though the knocker wanted to make sure that anyone inside heard the solitary sound. The apartment inside was silent, not even the dust stirred. 

The cramped mudroom that the door first entered into was darkened, though a light filtered carefully to it from the far end of the kitchen it seamlessly became, frail and flickering. The candle the light came from was small and fragile, a tiny tealight someone had left out, lit not even three minutes ago as the wax began to get clear all the way through. Its shaky light lit up where the kitchen gave way to the bedroom on one side, furthest away from the mudroom, and the loveseat and television that made up a stifling living room on the other with a small counter separating it. The television was utterly broken, and all of its electrical guts had been ripped out and thrown into the street, the glass of its face completely removed and scattered in infinitely miniscule pieces all over the floor. On the wall of the kitchen without any connecting rooms, a moderately large window looked down upon the city - the Pale City - the apartment was in, sprawling and dreary. The city was greyed out and colourless from the months and months of light rain without sun, washed so many times over that it had begun to stain itself with light shades in the darkness. A terrible deadness filled the air, as though no life could possibly live within the city limits anymore, at least not for long.

A shuffling came from outside the door, like the knocker was growing impatient. Then a terrible, staticky male voice came from the other side of the door, fading in and out like a broken radio signal.

“I know you’re in there. I will not break down this door but I will wait here forevermore unless you come and answer. Don’t worry, I’ll keep my hands at my sides as you open this frail wooden thing before me.”

Finally, there was a shift from the bedroom, and a tiny little child dressed in a bright yellow rain slicker, a little girl named Six, quietly padded to the door. Her bare feet allowed her to get to the door without the knocker knowing how close she was, and she had to strangle a cry as the knocker knocked only once more, figuring she was still hidden in the depths of the apartment.

Then she moved again into the kitchen to grab a stool, placed it before the door handle, stepped up, and opened the door. Before it swung open all the way, she stepped down from the stool again, pushed it out of the door’s frame, and stood quietly as she stared at her uninvited visitor.

The doorway was filled by the frame of a tall, thin man, his lanky body too tall to allow Six to see his entire face from inside the apartment. He wore a tieless suit in solely shades of grey, as though he were reflecting the tone of the city (or perhaps it reflected him), and on his thin lips he wore a twisted, awful little smirk as he stared at Six so far below him. Six stood to the side of the door, though she did not cower, and the tall thin man stood straight and still directly in the middle, keeping his word as his long bony hands stayed at his thighs. Neither wished to break the silence, but finally the thin man did, for he knew that Six wouldn’t.

“So,” he said.

“So,” Six replied, her voice a hoarse whisper. “… Are you going to kill me now?”

“No,” said the thin man, his voice thinning out as though his signal had gotten mixed up somewhere, “I wasn’t planning on it. Though of course if that’s what you want then who am I to prevent your last request from coming true?”

Quickly, Six shook her head, and the thin man’s short, gargled laughter chilled her to her core.

“Rather,” the thin man said, and all mirth left his face while his voice tuned into a louder channel, and his head tilted to the side a little, “I simply wanted to see you. The real you. The one that doesn’t haunt my every excruciating second as I sit and try to find your source again.”

“And here I am,” said Six, her whisper growing weaker.

“And here you are,” repeated the thin man. “Yes, here you are. I take it you’ve been surviving well? You’ve found this nice, comfortable home, why don’t you get another television and settle down?”

“I’m leaving tonight,” Six replied flatly, and the thin man seemed to be taken aback. “I’m heading father from the sea, where the monsters and ghosts that have followed me will never find me again. I’ve grown tired of this worn place, and anxious whenever the slightest creek echoes through the building. I cannot stay.”

“You’re leaving me?” the thin man asked, and Six clenched her fists as she tried not to cry. “Why are you leaving? Where will you go? Why can’t you just stay here, where we can be together, where I can keep you safe?”

“You can’t keep me safe,” Six said, so quietly that the thin man almost couldn’t hear her, “not anymore, and I’m no good for you.”

“I know you’re no good, but what will I do with all this static in my mind, all these bodies that stain my soul? What will I do with the weight that keeps me here, alone, what will I do with the responsibility you’ve thrown me into? You’re the only familiar face left, I’ve no one else to turn to.”

“I don’t think I was ever familiar in the first place, you don’t need me. I don’t know what you need, really.”

“You’ll die beyond the city limits, there are monsters and terrors that will tear you apart. Don’t you remember the North Wind? You told me a boy told you about it, about how easily it rips and tears, don’t you worry about those monsters? Here you can be sheltered, kept away from those things that can catch and eat you…”

“If I get caught then it will be a mercy, but I don’t think anything can touch me now. Not after what I… what  _ we’ve _ been through. There’s too many stories laid upon me, there’s too much guilt and shame following me. I can’t stay still and wait to die in the colour bars and the red and blue blur. I’ll survive out there. I must.”

“But…” the thin man was at a loss for words, as he tried to think of something, and he tilted his head down far enough to the side that Six could see his eyes.

They weren’t watering, as they would be had they been the eyes of a child. No, the child the thin man had once been was gone, buried and dead since that final fatal day. Instead, they were dry but distant, not watching Six but rather watching the future he’d planned with her crumbling away as the idea of eternity in stasis died in his mind. Six could see the corruption he welded trying to win him over, telling him to simply snatch her up right then and there. He had the power to do so, to lock her away in time and rip her mind apart just to keep her there with him, suffering just as much as he did all the time. They could be timeless partners, him on his stiff wooden chair and her a plaything for him to bring out and solve puzzles with, like a raggedy doll. She wondered momentarily if he ever noticed how time itself seemed to bend to what he wanted, or perhaps subconsciously wished, or if he was oblivious to the twisted reality he lived in now.

But then she could see a little bit of light in him, and the corruption faded from his eyes. The air seemed to become less electrified, and Six realised that she’d been barely able to breathe as she gulped in a large amount of oxygen. She kept her head up and her eyes on the thin man, and watched as he seemed to back down, away from that awful fantasy. He stepped away from the door frame, and the clock on the kitchen counter began to tick again.

“I wanted to get away,” he said. “With you. We could have gone far, far away, together. Why did you let go?”

“Because I saw it,” Six replied, “all that you’d done to me, and all that you would be able to do in the future. You brought me along on that adventure, you led me to being captured twice, you insisted we go towards the Signal Tower and it’s terrifying broadcasts. You were already taken, manipulating the Tower and its power like some sort of god when I was corrupted-”

“No,” the thin man stopped her, and Six’s breath hitched as she halted, “why did you  _ actually _ let go? We… we’d built so much trust. We could have survived together, we could have become a pair that would go on to help the world, why did you think you had to let me go?”

“I…” Six hesitated, then finally looked down. “You pulled me out of the trappings I had built for myself, you saved me from withering away, but in doing so you trapped yourself. You became consumed by the power you’d gained, and I knew that eventually… eventually you’d be more lost than I ever was. That last time that I pulled you off the TV, before I’d been taken by a terror I hadn’t even known existed? I couldn’t pull you off that TV fast enough to save you from opening that static door, and I knew that it would only get worse and worse because I’d never be able to stop you from touching the televisions in the first place, from jumping through them like you’re jumping into the ocean. You’d built yourself a connection. And I- I wasn’t strong enough to keep you afloat afterwards, I knew it, I wouldn’t be able to keep you with me. You’d keep getting further and further away, and eventually you’d be lost to the broadcast signals, forever falling through the waves. And I’ve always been better off alone, I’d seen how close we’d gotten and I didn’t want to get that close ever again. I, maybe I wanted to hurt you, for helping me so much, because I wanted you to hate me so that you’d leave me alone, but ultimately I knew I could never actually help you, and that you’d never let anyone else help you. So I looked at you one last time, I saw who you were, the fear in your eyes, what you could become. I felt the anger in my heart at you, unfounded and cruel but hot and consuming nonetheless, and I couldn’t look past it as I watched the fear and corruption colour every feature in your face. And then I let you go. I was a coward and I… I’m sorry.”

The thin man was silent, and Six fell to her knees as she bowed her head. She could feel the air growing more and more electrified once again, the air in her very lungs leaving her as she began to cough and splutter. There wasn’t anything she could do, however, and she waited for the thin man to finally grab her as the anger at what she’d just confessed to ate him up. Maybe he’d be so courteous as to simply eat her and consume her soul, rather than drag her into the hell he’d been forced into as well, or maybe he’d turn her into another glitched child of the Tower, doomed to feed into its horrible power.

Then a tiny hand laid on her shoulder, and Six looked sharply up. She came face to face with the little boy she’d once known, Mono, in his long brown-green duster and brown-grey pants and shirt. She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed them, then opened them again to make sure he was really there, and Mono was still before her as he slid his hand off of her shoulder. His face was neutral but Six could feel something, an emotion she had never felt before, coming off of him.

“I don’t think I could ever forgive you,” he said, and Six once again shivered as the voice of the thin man who’d been in his place previously came from his lips, “but I’ll let you go. Don’t come back to the Pale City. Find someplace new. Soak up all the stories from all the children you meet like the story sponge you are. And don’t you dare get trapped again, lest the tricks your mind will play on you because of your trap led you back to me. I never want to see you, the real you, again. I’ll kill you if I see you again, for trying to kill me.”

“I-I know,” Six forced herself to say, her throat closing up as she tried to keep breathing. “You’ve already tried to before.”

“I have?” Mono asked, and his form began to warp as he let go of the image of who he used to be.

Six gasped as air once again returned to her lungs, and she nodded. The thin man stood up from his stooped position that he’d placed himself in, then looked down at Six with a strange look in his eye.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“You ask so many questions,” replied Six, closing up her barred heart as she looked away, “you know I don’t like answering questions.”

“How do you know?” the thin man asked again, insistent this time.

“You should go now,” Six said in an even softer whisper, “you have places to be, and I must go before the city completely collapses. You’ll know what I mean later, when the universe you’ve built for yourself resets like a new episode of a show, when the new hero must fight the old evil that he’ll become. You’ll know when you finally give out, and when I can’t bring myself to break this godforsaken cycle we’ve made. You’ll know when you’re never truly free of me, when I keep coming back, when you die a thousand deaths that I could have easily prevented, when I beg for forgiveness in another life because of the wretched thoughts I think. I must go now, as well, so I can start running from the demons that lurk behind my eyelids every time I go to bed. Goodnight, Mono, and I hope that one day I can pull you up that fatal ledge, and you can come close to forgiving me.”

Six slipped past the thin man as he stood still and turned his head to watch her go. His form glitched every now and again, as though it couldn’t keep itself together, and Six knew the reset wasn’t too far off. She didn’t want to be there when the thin man was gone for good, sent back in time in his horrible loop, and the city started to disintegrate from lack of his magic.

She turned her back on him and ran for the stairs of the apartment complex. She could hear the thin man start to give chase, his slow, casual walk far behind, and her forced herself to go ever faster. Her feet hit the bottom, and she dashed across the apartment foyer towards the exit. There was a feeling of sudden loss in her heart, and she knew the thin man- no, she knew that Mono was gone for good. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment as she willed the feeling of unending sadness away, then she opened her eyes again and continued forward. The apartment building began to groan louder and more intensely than it had before, and she leapt out of the broken glass of the front doors.

The street was already crumbling, and a crack streaked down the middle as the abyss the city was perched on top of threatened to consume it completely. Six sprinted down the street to where the crack hadn’t reached yet, then down another couple of blocks. Her thin, malnourished body ached and burned, but she pushed herself onward until finally,  _ finally _ , she’d left the Pale City. The ground rumbled and roared at her as it tried one last time to get her in its vast maw, then it settled as she moved further into the grassland she found herself in. Behind her, she heard the last screams of the buildings as the Pale City fell, and she lowered her eyes to her toes.

There was so much she could have done, she knew. There were so many things that she could have changed. But she had to move on, she had to survive and live with the choices she made. Her story was far from over, and she was determined to see it through, even if she hated herself for it. With as much calm as she could muster, she began her journey to someplace new. She hummed an old, familiar tune as she went, to try and drown out the sound of her grumbling stomach and the voice in her head that told her evil, terrible things.

**Author's Note:**

> So I finished writing this, then got all the glitched children to see the secret ending, so you can tell that I wasn't actually keeping that in mind when I wrote it lmao, I tried to fix that in the end but eh oh well haha  
> Hope y'all enjoyed this one that I kinda smashed together, the children are talking like adults and saying things that would otherwise be locked away in their minds but oh well! Tis the joys of writing fanfic, if a character is ooc it literally does not matter. Thank you for reading and until next time!


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